Poem of the Week: TREATY by Reihana MacDonald

From: AUP New Poets 3, 1998

It’s Shakespeare as you’ve never seen it – put into a cultural blender of Asian theatre forms to create a visually stunning hybrid performance of The Bard’s fantastical tale of Pericles.

According to Director, Dr Megan Evans, Victoria’s senior undergraduate students have incorporated the Chinese theatre form of Jingju and the Japanese forms of Noh, Kyōgen, Kabuki and Bunraku to put a different spin on Shakespeare’s take of princesses, prostitutes and kings.

David Aaronvitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History. Reviewed by MATTHEW DENTITH

Jonathan Cape, London, 2009

If you are a singer in the “Conspiracy Theories are bunk!” choir and you love being preached to, then you will love David Aaronvitch’s new book, Voodoo Histories. If, on the other hand, you are even just a little sceptical of “Conspiracy Theory Scepticism,” then odds are Aaronvitch’s book will ultimately cause you to engage in um-ing, ah-ing and copious sighing.

I don’t think there is much middle ground.

In Voodoo Histories Aaronovitch has set himself the task of showing up a selection of popular Conspiracy Theories. His intended audience is people like himself, who know that Conspiracy Theories are bunk and just need some ammunition to prove it.

A clown, a storyteller and a philosopher: Three French comic book writers

By Sam Buchanan

In Harum Scarum and The Hoodoodad, from the series titled The Spiffy Adventures of McConey, Lewis Trondheim writes comics that are proud to be silly. His characters, a rabbit and a cat, blunder through their adventures guided by a logic and recklessness that stems more from laziness than intelligence or courage. They demonstrate that, as a survival mechanism, stupidity is hugely underrated.

Trondheim often collaborates with other writers – with Manu Larcenet (see below) on the madcap Astronauts of the Future – and with Olivier Appollodorus on Bourbon Island 1730. More historical fiction than comedy, it’s a tale of an ornithologists (who is a duck) coming into contact with the last few embers of piracy on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion while searching for a live dodo. The setting is a fascinating society of slaves, plantation owners and former pirates whom isolation is slowly forcing together, while the communities of escaped slaves in the mountains are hunted down and massacred.